Computational Modelling Group

ParaView

ParaView is an open-source, multi-platform data analysis and visualization application. ParaView users can quickly build visualizations to analyze their data using qualitative and quantitative techniques. The data exploration can be done interactively in 3D or programmatically using ParaView's batch processing capabilities.

ParaView was developed to analyze extremely large datasets using distributed memory computing resources. It can be run on supercomputers to analyze datasets of terascale as well as on laptops for smaller data.

Projects

Engine designers want computer programs to help them invent ways to use less fuel and produce less pollution. This research aims to provide an accurate and practical model for the injection and combustion of liquid fuel blends.

The behaviour of multiphase flows is of primary importance in many engineering applications. In the past, experimental observations have provided many researchers with the ability to understand and probe the phenomena and physical processes occurring in such flows. With advancements in modern day computational power, we now have the ability to gain an even greater wealth of knowledge, from what used to be a physical experiment, is now a virtual simulation.

Amine-Eddine, G.H. (2015) Body forces in particle suspensions in turbulence. University of Southampton, Faculty of Engineering and the Environment, Doctoral Thesis , 283pp.

The £10million Centre for Doctoral Training was launched in November 2013 and is jointly funded by EPSRC, the University of Southampton, and its partners.

The NGCM brings together world-class simulation modelling research activities from across the University of Southampton and hosts a 4-year doctoral training programme that is the first of its kind in the UK.

This project involves the simulation of turbulent flow around a marine rim-driven thruster and the complex interaction of flow features involved through computational fluid dynamics. Following this, the optimisation of design parameters using computational fluid dynamics to calculate the objective function is performed and surrogate modelling utilised to estimate optimum design configuration.

The security threat level from international terrorism, introduced by the UK Security Service, has been classified as either "severe" or "critical" for much of its six-year history, and currently remains as "substantial" (source: MI5 website). Part of the risk posed by terrorist threats involves potential releases of air-borne chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear (CBRN) material into highly populated urbanised areas. Smoke from industrial accidents within or in the vicinity of urban areas also pose risks to health and can cause widespread disruption to businesses, public services and residents. The Buncefield depot fire of 2005 resulted in the evacuation of hundreds of homes and closure of more than 200 schools and public buildings for two days; consequences would have been much more severe if prevailing meteorological conditions had promoted mixing or entrainment of the smoke plume into the urban canopy. In both these scenarios it is crucial to be able to model, quickly and reliably, dispersion from localised sources through an urban street network in the short range, where the threat to human health is greatest. However, this is precisely where current operational models are least reliable because our understanding and ability to model short-range dispersion processes is limited. The contribution that DIPLOS will make is:

1. to fill in the gaps in fundamental knowledge and understanding of key dispersion processes, 2. to enable these processes to be parametrized for use in operational models, 3. to implement them into an operational model, evaluate the improvement and apply the model to a case study in central London

Most of the existing research on urban dispersion has focused on air quality aspects, with sources being extensive and distributed in space. Scientifically, this research is novel in focusing on localized releases within urban areas, and on dispersion processes at short range. Through a combination of fundamental studies using wind tunnel experiments and high resolution supercomputer simulations, extensive data analysis and development of theoretical and numerical models, DIPLOS will contribute to addressing this difficult and important problem from both a scientific research and a practical, operational perspective.

The project aims at extending the micromagnetic simulation framework 'nmag' developed at the University of Southampton to enable it to handle dynamic geometries. The extended framework will then be used to study systems such as interacting magnetic nanoparticles.

Traditionally, the design of turbomachinery components has been exclusively accomplished with steady CFD, with Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) models being the predominant choice. With computing power continuously increasing, high-fidelity numerical simulations of turbomachinery components are now becoming a valuable research tool for validating the design process and continued development of design tool.In the current project, Direct Numerical Simulations (DNS) and other eddy-resolving approaches will be performed of turbomachinery components to establish benchmark data for design tools, and to investigate physical mechanisms that cannot be captured by traditional CFD approaches.

This is a Knowledge Transfer Partnership project is a collaboration between the University of Southampton and TSL Technology Ltd. to develop computational fluid dynamics software design tools for modelling and optimising the design of propeller thrusters and water turbine generators.

An area of research currently of interest in the marine industry is the effect of damage on ship structures. Research into the behaviour of damaged ships began in the mid nineties as a result of Ro-Ro disasters (e.g. Estonia in 1994). Due to the way the Estonia sank early research mainly focused on transient behaviour immediately after the damage takes place, the prediction of capsize, and of large lateral motions. Further research efforts, headed by the UK MoD, began following an incident where HMS Nottingham ran aground tearing a 50m hole from bow to bridge, flooding five compartments and almost causing the ship to sink just off Lord Howe Island in 2002. This project intends to answer the following questions: “For a given amount of underwater damage (e.g. collision or torpedo/mine hit), what will be the progressive damage spread if the ship travels at ‘x’ knots? OR for a given amount of underwater damage, what is the maximum speed at which the ship can travel without causing additional damage?”

Understanding of laminar to turbulent transition in hypersonic boundary-layer flows is crucial for re-entry vehicle design and optimization. The boundary-layer state directly affects the temperatures on the vehicle surface and its viscous drag. Therefore transition has to be considered to correctly compensate for drag and to properly design the thermal protection system. For the proposed study, in order to obtain a clear understanding of the transition process, the configuration is kept as simple as possible by varying only a minimum number of parameters affecting transition on a simple test geometry such as a swept ramp at different sweep angles. To investigate the influence of such sweep angles on the transition process in the hypersonic regime, Direct Numerical Simulations (DNS) of the turbulent flow field are carried out on the Iridis cluster.

Nmag is a micromagnetic simulation package based on the general purpose multi-physics library nsim. It is developed by the group of Hans Fangohr and Thomas Fischbacher in the School of Engineering Sciences at the University of Southampton and released under the GNU GPL.

OpenDreamKit is a [Horizon 2020](https://ec.europa.eu/programmes/horizon2020/) European Research Infrastructure project (#676541) that will run for four years, starting from September 2015. It will provide substantial funding to the open source computational mathematics ecosystem, and in particular popular tools such as LinBox, MPIR, SageMath, GAP, Pari/GP, LMFDB, Singular, MathHub, and the IPython/Jupyter interactive computing environment.

The manipulation of magnetic skyrmions could prove to be a useful technique for storing data on an unprecedented density scale. In this project we seek to better understand their properties and ways to control them.

An ever increasing need for data storage creates great challenges for the development of high-capacity storage devices that are cheap, fast, reliable, and robust. Because of the fundamental constraints of today's technologies, further progress requires radically different approaches. Magnetic skyrmions are very promising candidates for the development of future low-power, high-capacity, non-volatile data storage devices.

Understanding the interaction between surface roughness and supersonic air flows are crucial in the design of high speed vehicles, including space re-entry vehicles. Numerical simulations of these flows has been conducted in order to examine and understand how the surface roughness interacts with high speed flows in terms of drag prediction and heat transfer to the wall surface.

Despite a good knowledge of the physiology of bats and birds, engineering applications with active dynamic wing compliance capability are currently few and far between. Recent advances in development of electroactive materials together with high-fidelity numerical/experimental methods provide a foundation to develop biologically-inspired dynamically-active wings that can achieve "on-demand" aerodynamic performance. However this requires first to develop a thorough understanding of the dynamic coupling between the electro-mechanical structure of the membrane wing and its unsteady aerodynamics. In this collaborative initiative between the University of Southampton and Imperial College London, we are developing an integrated research programme that carries out high-fidelity experiments and computations to achieve a fundamental understanding of the dynamics of aero-electro-mechanical coupling in dynamically-actuated compliant wings. The goal is to utilise our understanding and devise control strategies that use integral actuation schemes to improve aerodynamic performance of membrane wings. The long-term goal of this project is to enable the use of soft robotics technology to build integrally-actuated wings for Micro Air Vehicles (MAV) that mimic the dynamic shape control capabilities of natural flyers.

There is a genuine need for better, more robust modelling of suspended sediment transport in the coastal zone, both to understand its morphological evolution and it's impact on biogeochemical cycling, ecosystems services and to guide engineering applications such as dredging and defence schemes against erosion and flooding. The suspension of sediment in turbulent flows is a complex case of fluid-particle interaction, governed by shear stresses (momentum exchanges) at the bed and within the benthic boundary layer (BBL). The intermittent transfer of momentum is a manifestation of coherent turbulent vortex structures within the flow. The passage of such structures (or clusters of) is often related to perturbations of bottom sediment, which may be entrained and maintained in suspension if sufficient turbulent energy is provided. The first part of my PhD investigated the temporal and scale relationships between wave–generated boundary layer turbulence and event–driven sediment transport in oscillatory flow in the nearshore. This involved complex statistical, spectral, quadrant and wavelet analysis of high frequency nearshore measurements of turbulence and suspended sediments (medium sand), collected as part of the EU-funded Barrier Dynamics Experiment II (BARDEX II). The following step aims to develop a 3D numerical model in OpenFOAM which would reproduce the fine scale turbulence structures observed over a fixed rippled bed in oscillatory flow. The 3D velocity field, turbulent components, correlations (stresses) and quadrant structures will then be linked to observed sediment resuspension events. The model will be validated against a set of laboratory experiments undertaken at the Fast Flow Facility at HR Wallingford.